


The Tipping Point

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, mystrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 14:46:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4395977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Largely prose, ending in dramatic shift. Largely character study.  This variant on "my" Mycroft is mature, assertive, private and reserved and controlled, but not particularly shy or bashful, and definitely not so much inexperienced as no longer in the running most of the time. </p><p>Mycroft in seductive mode. Lestrade...quite content with that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tipping Point

Mycroft had always liked an older man. In his brief semi-twink period, short-lived and never very successful, that had worked out well. While all the other, prettier young men chased the buff, cut beefcake their own age or no more than a few years older, Mycroft had succumbed willingly to suave older men whose figures might not have been so svelte nor skin so taut, but whose minds were just beginning to reach their prime, and whose manners extended to honest and affectionate mentorship not only in bed, but out.

As he himself had aged, the preference had ceased to matter much. Indeed, if anything he had come to choose his lovers against type. He pursued the twinkliest of twinks: the airheaded sugarplum fairies who would fail to notice the complexity of the leopard stalking them or the Spartan simplicity and brevity of the connection. He took them down like gazelles and was gone by morning. Had the metaphor of predator and prey been more exact, he’d have littered the town with their polished white bones gleaming in the red sunrise, and crime scenes leaving nothing for the game keepers of human London to deduce beyond “Culled by an apex predator. Weakness: too stupid to live.”

In time even that activity slowed. There were too many risks associated with lovers, and his life was too completely banjanxed with risk already. He couldn’t afford the sudden, terrifying moments of sentiment that could still take him unawares, even in the heart of incandescent cocksmanship. He would never forget growling against a nameless lover’s mouth, their teeth clashing as they ripped orgasms out of alienation—and suddenly, he opened his eyes and saw the lonely boy groping for connection from what was only sex, and his heart broke, and his cock wilted, and he had to cry off.

For many years he’d rationed his empty encounters out like a dieter rations out brownies… and had more often chosen to go without entirely than suffer the emotional spike and inevitable plummet.

He was, after all, over forty now—midway to fifty. His body was less demanding. He could not only resist temptation, but deplore it when it did impose itself, and even more often miss it altogether.

No man was an island—but Mycroft felt he was doing a reasonably good job of imitating a peninsula with a slim, fragile neck connecting him to land. That neck was not, thank God, sexual. Instead there were a few small, select skeins of people who bound him—heart, soul, loyalty.

Her Majesty, of course.  Of dull necessity her varied, struggling family, all crippled in a thousand ways by the royalty they shared but so seldom used well. Crown and country, after all—and Mycroft could too easily imagine the life burden carried over decades by the resolute former Princess Elizabeth. She had been handed her yoke young, and in times that demanded fortitude and a carefully cultivated blend of intense privacy and plausible charisma.

The Queen, he suspected wryly, was his Marilyn. His Judy Garland. His Garbo. The feminine expression of his masculine isolation and loneliness. He could laugh about it—Elizabeth in her tidy little twin sets and inescapable hats, head up, jaw set. Other gay men swooned over Bacall’s earthy growl or Hepburn’s Brahmin twang and posh regality. Him? A short little dab of a woman with a soul of steel and a wardrobe dictated by the most conservative of aesthetics. God Save the Queen… But it was a relationship that existed in the ideal far more than the real, and while his heart would break, and break, and never heal after the day Elizabeth died and the black palanquin was hauled through London to her funeral and internment, it was a thing of fantasy and shadow, not flesh.

Then there was his work team—more real, perhaps, than his love of Queen Elizabeth II, but still quite carefully bounded round with barriers that kept it from being too intimate. Anthea, of all his people, was closest to being beloved. But she knew her place, and valued her own distance. They were in a profession that made even mild friendship something done warily, and with protections.

Mummy and Father, of course. He could not travel back into his own history, excise the primal bonds that formed before he had language, before he had experience, before he had understanding. As Mummy always said, “You will always be my baby.” But parents died, and over the years he had started to ward himself against that, coupling increasing commitment to their living selves with armor against their inevitable ghost selves. They would become his honored dead.

Then there was Sherlock…his weakness. His conundrum. The boy he could not abide. The child he could not abandon. The brat he could not protect. The man he could not control. The knife in his back, the poison in his gullet, the hope of his secret heart for friendship. His abiding failure.

And through Sherlock, Sherlock’s friends, who somehow became entangled in his life, whether he wanted them there or not. John-bloody-stick-necked-Watson who was not even half so bright as he liked to think he might be, nor one tenth as capable of rising to any occasion, but who was loving, and loyal, and ferocious, and dark, and who was almost as certainly Sherlock’s salvation and damnation in one maddening package. Mary Watson, beloved killer. That odd, lunatic, embarrassingly intuitive Mrs. Hudson. The list went on, sometimes seeming to expand in leaps and bounds since Sherlock had first chosen to play detective.

Which inevitably led to Lestrade. Who was obviously too ordinary and too…too easily taken advantage of…to risk entangling any further than Sherlock and professional expedience demanded. A goldfish. Or, perhaps, a solid, laughing silver and bronze koi, drifting placidly beneath the cover of floating lotus on a meditation pool. But definitely someone to keep at a safe distance.

Mycroft had managed it for years. Five before John Watson even showed up. Another five and more since then. A sound professional relationship maintained over the long arc of time, trusting--and transparent up to exactly the degree needed, after which it became utterly opaque. Solid and binding until exactly the moment it became smoke, then nothingness.

But Mycroft had always liked an older man. That sang to something deep in his soul. He might scold himself, mock his longing for an elder, for someone to shelter him as he had always sheltered Sherlock, for a father to be pleased with him in ways he never seemed to have pleased his own father. He could narrow his eyes bitterly and fulminate over hypothetical neuroses and psychoses indicated by the preference—but there it was.  He had always liked an older man—and Lestrade?

Youth and age in a shining package. A boy’s smile—a boy’s laugh. A man’s scathing, biting wit and snark. A boy’s sense of adventure, almost as bad as Sherlock and that madman Watson. A man’s sense of responsibility and necessity. A boy’s mischief. A man’s kindness.  His body showed his age, with grace and kindliness. His eyes and mind defied age, forever young.

Mycroft had had a decade and then some to appreciate the man. His competence—as a copper, as a spy, as a bear-keeper of wayward baby brothers. His adaptability. His good will. Even his temper.

Mycroft did not like fighting. Not the martial arts sort, though he could in a pinch. Nor did he really like the slogging, unending oblique confrontations that faced the “fixer” in the world of warriors and politicians. Most of all he despised the toxic cruelty of personal warfare—the way Sherlock could lay Mycroft’s soul bare with a single rage-fueled sentence that could never be taken back and never, ever be forgotten, even if love demanded it be forgiven. He had never enjoyed conflict. He’d been the family peacemaker. The child who slowly fought meltdown when parents quarreled, or Sherlock was once again up to his neck in trouble.

He had always assumed he had no tolerance for conflict.

Then he had worked with Lestrade, and somehow found himself in a working relationship where he could, on his bad days, say the most savage things—where Lestrade could snarl back with reflexive anger—only to find at the end of the day that the hurts were not there.

Things Lestrade said—they were either patently true and not worth his affront, or equally patently hyperbolic ranting forgotten in seconds, and again not worth consideration unless one wished to cherish them for their sudden blazing, furious wit. Lestrade was safe to rage at. Safe to be raged at by. Like summer thunderstorms, it all passed…leaving clear air and the scent of ozone.

There was the sense of security he felt when he knew Sherlock was backed by Lestrade, as well as Watson. The stability he felt when Lestrade was on some other project for him.

But he had not succumbed. He was resolute. He was chaste. He was pristine. He was a peninsula, and perhaps he could even be an island at high tides. Lestrade was a valued colleague, one of Mycroft Holmes’ few connections to the mainland of the human race. But that was all.

Mycroft never knew why that changed. He never knew what triggered it. He knew the day. He knew the moment, even. Mycroft had come up the stairs of Baker Street for a meeting with Sherlock, only to find the older Met officer standing in the front window behind Sherlock’s chair, a bottle of Newcastle Brown in one hand, looking down on the street below. As Mycroft crossed the little landing into the flat, Lestrade heard him coming, and turned. The sun shone on silver-grey hair. Eyes lit warmly. He was grace and wisdom and patience and control combined. He was man in his prime. He was…

God help me, Mycroft thought, without pause or hesitation. Let other idiots have Adonis and Narcisus and Ganymede. Cherish your Apollos, you fools. Give me Father Poseidon. Give me the king, not Prince Charming.

Mycroft stopped in the door—poised like a living statue, watching Lestrade. Lestrade watched him back, eyes inscrutable, patient, amused. The man took an easy swig from the bottle, head tipping back, throat exposed, Adam’s apple bobbing gently before he let the bottle fall and returned to his easy observation of Mycroft.

I am going to seduce him, Mycroft thought, with conviction. I am going to seduce him now.

He stepped forward, then, and crossed the room. He was a shy man, in many ways, and reserved, but he was neither a virgin nor prey. He was the apex predator—as a professional, and in his private life. He let his muscles flow. He felt his stance grow liquid. His feet dropped lightly on Sherlock’s carpet as he crossed the room to Lestrade, coming to a stop only when he had reached the bare tolerable edge of personal space. Lestrade’s breath crossed the slight distance, yeasty and sour with beer…a good scent, clean and wholesome. Lestrade’s eyes never left his.

Sherlock, Mycroft deduced without thinking, was in his bedroom, though he would be out soon. Mrs. Hudson was downstairs, but watching telly. For this brief moment he had the room alone with Greg Lestrade.

“You are the most attractive man of my acquaintance,” he said to Lestrade, voice dropping below his normal tenor, diving for Sherlock’s deeper growl. It was true—had always been true, but had become perfectly, eternally true only a moment before. From that moment on, on a scale framed by Mycroft’s own soul, there was no greater perfection, no more desirable man. He waited, not in fear, but to gauge Lestrade’s response.

The other man’s head cocked, slightly. He grinned, teeth flashing. “Not afraid I’ll faint or punch you, I see,” he said, considering.

“Give me credit. I did my homework on you over ten years ago. I’ve continued to keep tabs. You may turn me down. You were never going to scream like a little girl.”

“Score to Holmes,” he said, with a little, cheeky nod, and took another long swig of beer. "And your guess about your chances?”

Mycroft felt the victory rise up his spine, take his shoulders, fill his chest, lift his head like a tall sunflower’s. He grinned, a leopard’s grin—for the first time in years, a leopard greeting a leopard, not a gazelle. The look in Lestrade’s eyes alone told him it was already a certainty. He phrased it more gently. It is possible to undo even a sure thing. “Excellent."

“And why’s that?” Lestrade’s body leaned toward Mycroft’s.  His voice had softened to a rumbling murmur. “What you offering that’s too good to turn down?”

"A veritable catalogue of possibilities.” The two men angled their bodies, feet shifting in micrometers, bones shifting, and somehow by magic they were aligning to husk in each other’s ears without ever, quite, touching. Without ever quite ceasing to be two proper men talking quietly in a street-front window. “The things I could do with you…the mind riots. Pin you to a wall and bring you to climax in under ten minutes without either of us ever undressing. Strip you naked and take you on the grand piano on the family estate, until the great old beast rocks on its pins and the inner harp hums resonance as we come. Ride your cock for hours, slow and lazy, each of us waiting until a Tantric guru would bow before our restraint, then get off so hard we shout the heavens down. I offer lazy afternoons under a willow by a stream, naked and alone, your cock swallowed to the root, followed by a long naked swim as trout slip past your shins and minnows nibble the bubbles trapped in the curls around your prick. I can see tying you to the headboard of the bed in my city flat. Or letting you tie me. I offer sex hot and dirty and wet and crazy. I offer it slow and steady and sweet, the two of us coming slow as sunrise to the North Pole in spring.”

He could hear Lestrade’s breath catch. He could feel the heat of the other man’s body. He could smell the faint scent of soap and sweat and aftershave and cigarette smoke and beer. He could see the sun glint in the faint stubble on the man’s neck. He could watch his lashes fall over dark eyes, see those lashes shiver with the heat of the desires hidden behind those lids.

“You talk pretty,” Lestrade whispered, heavily, laughingly, longingly.

“You did ask.”

“Yeah, I did.” Lestrade opened his eyes again. “When?”

“Now.”

“Sherlock?”

“Let’s let him fend for himself.”

Lestrade nodded. He set the bottle on the sill of the window. He moved past Mycroft, letting his shoulders brush Mycroft’s chest, his arm brush Mycroft’s sleeve. He took up his overcoat, draped over the little chair at the computer station under the buffalo’s head. He headed for the stairs, Mycroft behind him. They caught a cab for Mycroft’s flat, not wanting to deal with the government-provided limo or the chauffeur’s perceptive eyes.

They never did make it to bed that time. But, then…Mycroft always did like an older man.


End file.
